Our Long Island community has long been ground zero for the peace and anti-nuclear movement.
For decades, this group has faithfully organized an annual commemoration of dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945. It is an event that rallies and re-energizes citizen action, powered by the steadfast commitment of activists including Stanley Romaine and Shirley Romaine of Great Neck SANE/Peace Action and Margaret Melkonian of LI Alliance for Peaceful Alternatives..
This year’s commemoration of the 68th Anniversary of the atomic bombings, held at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Shelter Rock on Aug 6, took an expansive view, not just reaffirming a commitment to peace and diplomacy to resolve conflicts instead of war, and not just renewing the call for nuclear disarmament, but also affirming the need to save the planet by addressing climate change and environmental deprivation that comes with fracking and exploiting fossil fuels.
It is class “think globally; act locally.”
After all, humans typically go to war over scarce resources and territory – religion, politics and ethnic/tribal divisions are just the proxy for inciting such a level of hatred that individuals are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice – effectively wrapping killing in a cloak of “nobility.”
Fraking can be considered a local issue, but it is bound up in climate change, which has the potential of rendering 200 million people refugees from flooded coastlines because of sea level rise; drought causes famine and high food prices. Potable water can become more valuable than oil. Just think how many wars have been fought and dictators propped up to satisfy our addiction to oil.
Environmental destruction is also a by-product of war, and none more extreme and horrific than when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 68 years ago, Aug. 7 and 9, 1945.
Great Neck SANE, Long Island Peace Alternatives and the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Shelter Rock ,which has been hosting the annual event, use that singular event to advance an alternative: when people talk to each other, see each other face to face, when there is dialogue and diplomacy, it is much less likely those individuals will murder each other.
“Violence is about dehumanizing others so you can somehow inflict your will, your way – verbally, physically,” said Town of North Hempstead Supervisor Jon Kaiman, the co-chair of the event for a decade. He pointed to the opposite, where communities come together around some event. That happens on a regular basis in this town, home to Indians and Pakistanis, Jews and Arabs, Iraqis and Iranians.
“We still maintain our beliefs and integrity and yet not want to pursue the violence that has persisted. So if we can get along here, why can’t we around the world,” Kaiman said
You don’t need an actual war, though, to inflict violence – there is an epidemic of gun violence, as state Assemblywoman Michelle Schimel noted in her remarks (which were delivered by Fran Reid because Schimel was called away to an emergency).
A long-time advocate for sensible gun control including national background checks and a ban on high-capacity magazines and assault weapons, just that day, a gunman shot up a Town Hall meeting in Pennsylvania.
How is that for political discourse, especially as congressman are in their home districts this month and looking for encouragement to shut down government, crash the “full faith and credit” of the nation in order to extort Obama to repeal Obamacare?
Would you be brave enough to speak out in support of Obama in front of gun-wielding right-wingers, when a man just shot a 23-year old boy dead after a road rage incident?
And there is environmental violence.
Reid, who had just come from a climate conference with former Vice President Al Gore, cited James Hanson, the former climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute, who said that the energy trapped by man-made global warming pollution is equivalent to 400,000 Hiroshima-type bombs per day, 365 days a year, bringing the themes for the evening back together.
The theme of this year’s commemoration, “Rethinking Security: A Call to Action – No Nukes, No Wars, Ave the Planet” comes with an appeal and an agenda:
“The United States is spending over $54 billion annually on nuclear weapons programs,” said Margaret Melkonian, executive director of LI Alliance for Peaceful Alternatives.. “As we face economic challenges every day with so many of our infrastructure and pressing human needs of education, medical care, police and fire protection going unmet, we cannot afford nuclear weapons. The research, production and deployment of nuclear weapons are killing us.”
“Tonight is a call to action to the president, to fulfill his promise in Prague to convene an international conference for negotiations to eliminate nuclear weapons.
“Tell your Long Island Representatives and New York Senators to cut funding for modernization of new nuclear weapons and reduce military spending and use those funds to meet urgent needs in our communities to create jobs on Long Island, rebuild infrastructure, save the planet, invest in our children’s future and end poverty,” Melkonian said.
This is the essence of a resolution adopted in June by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, “Global Elimination of Nuclear Weapons and Redirection of Military Spending to Domestic Needs.”
The goal each year of the Hiroshima commemoration is to reignite citizen action, which over the past many decades, has been responsible for nuclear arms treaties, Geneva conventions, and ending wars in Vietnam and Ireland.
But citizen action, cultivated by these peace organizations over the past many decades, has to be informed. And so the media plays a role.
But what happens when there are obstacles to “knowing” the truth, the facts? What happens when the media is either kept away or worse, is complicit in spreading false messages or propaganda.
Amy Goodman, a hero to progressives and peace activists for her independent reporting on Democracy Now, the keynote speaker this year, brought this lesson home and drew a trajectory from Hiroshima to Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, from truth-tellers like journalist Wilfred Graham Burchett, who reported on the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, to whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden.
“The success of [her program] ‘Democracy Now’ attests to the hunger for independent voices, people hearing their own feelings, or opinions they absolutely disagree with,” Goodman, a Long Island native, said. “Media can be the greatest force for peace on earth. Instead, is wielded as a weapon of war. We have to take media back.
“What can be a more serious decision an country can make than going to war?… As long as our country is at war, it should be front page headlines every day, acknowledging the realities. If we saw those images, the response would be uniform across the country,” she said.
On the anniversary of dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, scarcely any media mentioned it. And yet, that tragedy holds lessons that should be part of the dialog today in terms of citizen’s ability to know what government is doing in their name and hold them accountable. A big share of that responsibility to the Media, which is the only “enterprise” protected in the Constitution by virtue of its role as a “Fourth Estate” – a watchdog on government and those who hold power.
Hiroshima and America’s nuclear weapons policy is a prime example.
Goodman tells the story, related in her book “Exception to the Rulers” (which she co-wrote with her brother, David Goodman), of Wilfred Graham Burchett, an Australian journalist, who defied General MacArthur’s orders and snuck into Hiroshima 30 days after the bomb, and reported what he saw.
Burchett sat down on a chunk of rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter. His dispatch began: “In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly—people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.…Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world.”
Burchett’s article was published on September 5, 1945, in the London Daily Express. The story caused a worldwide sensation but was a public relations fiasco for the U.S. military.
U.S. authorities responded in time-honored fashion to Burchett’s revelations: They attacked the messenger… U.S. officials accused Burchett of being influenced by Japanese propaganda. They scoffed at the notion of an atomic sickness.
Goodman contrasts Burchett with William L. Laurence, the Pulitzer Prize–winning science reporter for The New York Times, whose reporting supported the government’s position downplaying the effects of radiation and the human impact of the bombing.
An enthusiastic crusader for American nuclear power going back to 1929, Laurence had extraordinary access to the War Department – he even flew in the squadron of planes that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
In Laurence’s article about the bombing of Nagasaki (it was withheld by military censors until a month after the bombing), he described the detonation over Nagasaki that incinerated 100,000 people: ‘It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.”
And later, he said, it was like being “ in the presence of the supranatural.”
Laurence wrote these reports despite the fact he knew the truth about the effects of the atom bomb, Goodman says, because he had his own agenda.
But as Goodman reports, it turns out that William L. Laurence was not only working for The New York Times, but was also on the payroll of the War Department, producing press releases and even writing statements for President Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson.
(Amy and David Goodman are petitioning to have Laurence stripped of his Pulitzer, posthumously.)
Goodman then turns to Daniel Ellsberg, one of the most famous whistleblowers for the risk he took in exposing the Pentagon Papers, helped turn public opinion to force an end to the Vietnam War (she does not mention that Nixon’s campaign sabotaged a peace agreement just before the 1968 presidential election, which delayed the end of the war by four years and some 26,000 American deaths).
She held up with equal honor Bradley Manning, the young soldier who released hundreds of thousands of military and diplomatic documents to Wikileaks, as being in this same tradition of exposing the horrors of the way the U.S. was waging war.
One of the most powerful was the video taken from the military helicopter that shot into a crowd of civilians in Iraq, including killing two Reuters journalists, that shocked the world.
But Goodman says that six months earlier, the same crew blew up two Iraqi civilians holding their hands up.
Their commander said, “you can’t surrender to a helicopter” and authorized them to shoot to kill. Had that information been exposed, “there would have been outcry, calls for investigation, and that what happened six months later [when the same crew fired on civilians killing the Reuters journalists] would not have happened because there had been questions raised.”
“Could you imagine for just one week if we saw the images of war, especially on the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, if we saw the images of war today, like Bradley Manning tried to get to the American people, we saw the babies dead on ground in Iraq, soldiers dead and dying?” Goodman asked. “Americans are a compassionate people, they would say no, war is not the answer to conflict in the 21st century.”
Had Manning only revealed the video, which was sufficient to make his point about how America was waging its war, I would agree that he was a whistleblowing hero.
But Manning did not just reveal that video.
He dumped years and years worth of diplomatic cables and military documents without bothering to review them, or calculate what could happen to individuals who were revealed as collaborators or informants or agents, nor even how world leaders would react to the personal observations of diplomats.
If the peace activists are so keen on diplomacy over war, they should be upset about how diplomatic relationships were destroyed, and very possibly lives that were lost.
Consider also that out of perhaps one million people in uniform, very possibly 500,000 of them at any one time are politically and ideologically opposed to their commander-in-chief.
Does that mean they should have the right and the ability to sabotage their leaders? How could any commanding officer trust anyone under their command?
Whistleblowing should be rare and their objective so serious that their actions be truly noble, and important enough for them to suffer the consequences.
Goodman also holds up Ed Snowden as another whistleblower-hero.
But Snowden, a private contractor working for Booz Allen Hamilton, only revealed secrets of technology and techniques that had been authorized by Congress, not abuses by the Obama Administration in using surveillance to target political enemies, as Nixon and Bush/Cheney did.
And then Snowden fled to China and Russia, two of the most oppressive regimes on the planet, who routinely squash free speech and free press and imprison and kill political opponents.
And in the greatest and saddest irony of all is that Russia granting Snowden asylum was a factor causing President Obama to cancel the bilateral talks with Putin that were hoped to result in more progress on nuclear disarmament, not to mention Russia’s role in Iran, Syria and North Korea conflicts.
Indeed, Snowden has contributed to the re-ignition of the Cold War chill.
This is just the opposite of the dialogue that Great Neck SANE and LI Peace Alternatives champion as an alternative to bellicosity.
